hone his powers of concentration and help him remember what he has tasted. My closets are laden with dusty old notebooks so full of entirely tedious tasting notes that my wife's running out of space for her shoes. She's right, I probably ought to chuck “em. I hardly write notes anymore unless the wine is seriously moving. And I'm confident I can deconstruct a wine's flavor if I have to. In the early days I wasn't, none of us is, but like every muscle, this one got stronger the more I used it.
The greatest wines are the ones you can't write notes about because you're weeping, overcome with their loveliness. This happened to me in a restaurant in Paris one evening; the waiter must have thought my wife had just told me she didn't love me anymore and was absconding with the plumber. Nah, it was just the damned Jurançon. This, like all wine experiences, will jump out of the darkness at you, but it's okay, it's part of the spell. Don't fear the weeper.
There's no need to posture with your palate. Unless you publish tasting notes for a living, no one knows what you think or feel about the wines you drink except you. So don't play games. Don't grope for extravagant language, don't confuse what you admire or find interesting with what you spontaneously like, and please, if the wine smells like roses, it doesn't make you a better taster if you find some esoteric flower like buddleia to compare it to. Trust any impulse that emerges spontaneously, as these are most authentically you. Some wines intrigue with their mosaiclike arrangement of nuances, and it's fun to root around and glean the intricacy of the design. Other wines seem to be pure image. If you're at all in the synesthesia continuum you'll find color images come to you immediately. I definitely receive some wines as “green” or “orange” or “purple,” and while some of this is reassuringly literal—purple as aromas of irises, wisteria, lavender, violets, for example—other times I have no idea why a wine seems “silvery” or why it might play in a “major” key. I just know the image makes sense even if I can't make sense of it. Your notes should help you remember not only how the wine tasted, but what it was like to drink it.
And what of the notorious practice of blind tasting? What, indeed.
For some people it is the sine qua non of wine knowledge. Many of the exams for various wine titles (Master of Wine, famously) require proficiency at blind tasting. Why, I don't know. Once a guy can bench-press three hundred pounds, he needs a way to employ that strength; otherwise, he can show off his irrelevant prowess only on the bench. Blind tasting as such is hardly a skill that will be put to use in a wine career, unless you plan to make a living playing parlor games with wine. Importer and author Kermit Lynch said it best: “Blind tastings are to wine what strip poker is to love.”
Let's come back to the musical instrument metaphor. The palate is an instrument played by the taster. As you learn your instrument, you practice exercises and repetitions until you are skilled. Then it comes naturally. You don't get on a stage and play your exercises in front of an audience, and blind tasting is the equivalent of playing scales: valuable, necessary, but not to be confused with playing music or tasting wine.
When Keith Jarrett recorded The Melody at Night, with You, he was recovering from chronic fatigue syndrome. He couldn't play concerts; sometimes he could barely even sit at the piano for more than a few minutes. The CD is a recital of standards and folk melodies, played very straight, with little embellishment or technical bravura. The result is nearly sublime, tender, deliberate, caressing, essential, and pure. One time I answered the phone while the disc was playing, and as I walked back into the room I realized that if I'd been listening casually, I might have thought it was merely cocktail-lounge piano. Knowing the artist, his history, and the conditions under which the recording had been made gave it resonance and meaning.
What, then, is the value of reducing wine to a thing without context? What game is this we're insisting wine play along with? What's the good of tasting blind? Where's the silver lining of experiencing wine in a vacuum? Yes, it can train us to focus our palates and hone our powers of concentration. Then we can discard it! It has served its purpose. If we persist in tasting blind we run a grave risk—;because it is homicidal to a wine's context, and wine without context is bereft of meaning, and the experience of meaning is too rare to be squandered.
But, you protest, blind tasting makes you objective! Oh, nonsense. Can anyone who has ever tasted blind really assert any pure motivation toward truth and objectivity, or does that person simply need to win the game by making the right guess? Besides, blind tasting will guarantee your “objectivity” only if this objectivity is so fragile it needs such a primitive crutch. If you're too immature (or inexperienced) to be objective when you have to be, blind tasting won't help you. It will, however, confuse you as to the purpose of drinking wine. And I'm not talking about only recreational drinking (remember fun?); the only genuinely professional approach to wine is to know as much about it as possible. Who made it, under what conditions, what are the track records of the site and the vintner—then and only then can a genuinely thoughtful evaluation of a wine take place in the fullness of its being.
I wish I could tell you how to hasten the process of relaxing into wine. But it takes the time it takes. It can't be forced. Here's how it was for me.
One morning I woke up thinking about a high school teacher I hadn't remembered in years. Jane Stepanski taught honors English, which I took as a junior. I had no great love of reading, but I had all the love I could stand for Mrs. Stepanski. Looking back on it now, we were an awfully fatuous bunch, and it's touching how she forgave us.
I needed the pack. I wasn't a nerd; I was what used to be called a “freak” exactly two years early. So I needed shelter, and honors English provided it, ’cause all the misfits were there. Oh, I read a little, but mostly I was earnest and clueless. I recall when my classmates were especially derisive of what they called truth-and-beauty poems. I went along with the prevailing contempt: truth-and-beauty poems—ptui! Only ignorant clods liked those. What kinds of poems did I like? Um, er, ah…well—ahem— um, y'know, all kinds of poems as long as they were not truth-and-beauty poems.
Looking back, what can you do but laugh? I don't disdain how we were, how I was. I was pitiable, I was so needy, we all were; we hungered for any scrap of certainty, any solid bit of floor to stand on, and so we struck our attitudes and Jane somehow didn't spit at us. She let us be, and was respectful, and steered us gently away from our silliness.
When I first got into wine in my mid-twenties, I was like every fledgling wine geek. It consumed my every hour, and sadly, it also consumed anyone in my proximity for a couple years. But I was greedy for knowledge, or rather for information, and I did what every young person does: I sought to subdue the subject by acquiring mastery over it. Ignorance was frustrating and uncertainty was actively painful.
Wine was behaving like the mechanical rabbit that keeps the greyhounds running the track. No matter how much knowledge I hoarded, the ultimate target remained the same distance away. The “truth” of wine, it seemed, was a sliding floor…and even then you had to gain access to the room. It frustrated my craving for certainty, for command and mastery. And for a time I was angry at wine.
Now I think it was wine that was angry at me. But as patiently as my old honors English teacher, wine set about teaching me what it really wanted me to know.
First I needed to accept that in wine, uncertainty was an immutable fact of life. “The farther one travels, the less one knows.” There was no sense struggling against it; all that did was retard my progress toward contentment. But it is a human desire to ask why, to seek to know. Would wine always frustrate that desire as a condition of our relationship?
Far from it. But I was asking the wrong why. I clamored to understand “Why can't I know everything about wine?” But I needed to ask why I couldn't, why none of us ever can. Wine's essential uncertainty existed ineluctably, it seemed, and the most productive questions finally became clear: What purpose does this uncertainty
